Rcpp 0.12.8: And more goodies

Yesterday the eighth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp made it to the CRAN network for GNU R where the Windows binary has by now been generated too; the Debian package is on its way as well. This 0.12.8 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, the 0.12.6 release in July, and the 0.12.7 release in September — making it the twelveth release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. While we are keeping with the pattern, we have managed to include quite a lot of nice stuff in this release. None of it is a major feauture, though, and so we have not increased the middle number.

Among the changes this release are (once again) much improved exception handling (thanks chiefly to Jim Hester), better large vector support (by Qiang), a number of Sugar extensions (mostly Nathan, Qiang and Dan) and beginnings of new DateVector and DatetimeVectors classes, and other changes detailed below. We plan to properly phase in the new date(time) classes. For now, you have to use a #define such as this one in Rcpp.h which remains commented-out for now. We plan to switch this on as the new default no earlier than twelve months from now.

Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 843 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by eightyfour packages, or a full ten percent, just since the last release in early September!

Again, we are lucky to have such a large group of contributors. Among them, we have invited Nathan Russell to the Rcpp Core team given his consistently excellent pull requests (as well as many outstanding Stackoverflow answers for Rcpp). More details on changes are below.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.8 (2016-11-16)

Changes in Rcpp API:

String and vector elements now use extended R_xlen_t indices (Qiang in PR #560)